Someone, a mime, maybe the tall one, kissed her, and she kissed them back.
Her heart sped up, and up, and up, and the mime carried her to the side of the room, where they made out in a long-empty plastic cubicle. She felt breasts that weren’t her own under her palms, which made her laugh, until the mime pushed up against her, so she stopped laughing, the whole thing a mess of damp skin and pulsing lights and speakers so loud that she felt the bass in her bones.
“Cat!” she heard Bess screaming from somewhere far away. “Your tits are out!”
“Great! Let’s be free,” Cat cried out.
“Pull up your dress!”
Cat looked up and saw a phone pointed at her. Dammit. She peeled the mime off her body and hoiked her dress up as far as it would go. The mime smiled happily and danced back into the crowd.
“I want to be in bed,” Bess yelled over the music. “Can we go?”
Cat stood up and immediately swayed sharply to the right. Bess caught her. “I’m taking that as a yes,” she said, dragging Cat out of the building and wedging her into another waiting Mercedes.
Inside the car, Cat looked disoriented. “I think something was in my drink,” she mumbled. “I should not be this fucked up.”
“You whiffed some Molly, Cat, that’ll do it,” Bess insisted.
“Oh…whoops. But not that much,” Cat said as she slumped into the seat.
When they pulled up to the hotel, two photographers waited outside. Inside the privacy of the car’s blackout windows, Bess slapped Cat hard across the face. “Wake up!” she snapped. “Walk straight back to the little gold elevator. You can do it.”
Cat nodded. She managed to walk through the lobby without falling, but her dress was covered in the mime’s handprints and her face was smeared with lipstick, so the men took her photo with obvious delight. When they got up to the Eurydice Suite, Bess dragged Cat into the bathroom and dumped her onto the floor of the shower, turning on the water and forcing Cat to wash off the paint with the hotel’s bodywash before drawing a bath for herself and doing the same. But the water didn’t make Cat feel better—only worse. She felt something rise up in her throat and vomited for the second time that night, onto the shower’s tiled marble floor.
“Cat! Are you okay?” Bess shouted from the bathtub across the room.
Cat raised herself up and pushed the vomit toward the drain with her fingers.
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “I feel much better now.” Cat stood up, rinsed herself clean, and grabbed a towel. It was warm and fluffy and soft.
“I have the worst headache of my entire life,” Bess complained as she climbed out of the tub. Cat nodded in agreement, her skull crackling with pain, like she’d been hit with a hammer. Yet, somehow, both women managed to stumble onto their silk beds, piled high with duvets and heavy goose-down pillows.
“Night, Cat,” Bess called out, half under her sheets.
“Night, Bess,” Cat called back.
When they fell asleep, it was straight into a black hole.
Chapter Nineteen
Molly Beale stood over Cat’s bed, panicking.
Cat was facedown in a pile of pillows, a towel wrapped haphazardly around her naked body. Bess was passed out cold in her own room. Their two beautiful suede dresses (on loan to RAGE from the designers) were soaking wet, covered in paint, and discarded on the bathroom floor, completely ruined. Molly tried shaking Cat. Nothing.
She grabbed a remote and hit Play. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s “Hoedown” blasted as loudly as the suite’s speaker system would allow.
Bess bolted out of bed first. “Oh my god, oh my god, make it stop,” she screamed, until she saw Molly, at which point she laughed weakly and grabbed a sheet. But Cat still wouldn’t budge. Molly turned the music off. She dug in her handbag for a compact and held it under Cat’s nose; it fogged up, but barely.
“Something’s wrong with Cat,” she said to Bess, her voice shaking with fear. “She won’t wake up.”
“Oh my god,” Bess said, running toward her friend’s apparently lifeless body. Molly raised her hand to slap Cat and her palm connected, hard, but Cat still didn’t stir; the only change was a faint red mark on her cheek. Bess ran to the bathroom and filled a tumbler with cold water, dumping it on Cat’s head. Still: nothing.
“Call an ambulance,” she told Molly, still shaking Cat. “Call one right now.”
As Molly picked up the phone, Cat finally rolled over and pulled her towel up. “I’m awake,” she said groggily. “I’m fine.”
Lou Lucas, wedged on a plastic folding chair next to the rented apartment’s lead-paned windows, scowled through her binoculars. They hadn’t left the hotel all day. Had she gone too far? No. They’ll still be ruined tomorrow, she told herself. It wouldn’t be like them to skip tonight’s event. Even if they had the mother of all hangovers, Cat and Bess would try to get out, she was certain.
She stood up and looked around the apartment, a high-ceilinged attic space with broad beams and thick plaster walls that she’d found online. From this aerie set high on the hill of Montmartre and facing the river, she could see all of Paris and its tangled mess of alley-sized streets. Copper windows winked in the sun, terra-cotta chimneys popped up by the hundreds, and colorful laundry lines stretched all around her, their bounty swaying gently in the breeze, while horns honked, teenagers laughed, and smoke drifted up from cafés. It was positively cheerful. Lou forced herself to be optimistic.
This time next week, she told herself sternly, you’ll have everything you want. A bit tricky, to be sure. But everything that was truly valuable had to be earned. Nobody would give those things to you. You simply had to do what everyone else did: take it by force.
An exhausted Cat, propped up on the dirty steps in front of the Paris Opera, tried to stay awake as they waited for the Phoebe show, an unofficial presentation by an upstart local brand, to begin. She’d been sewn into a long column from Albert V., made from a blend of vicu?a—a Peruvian wool so fine that it came in only one color, a nutty golden tone—and ivory artificial bee silk grown in a lab at MIT, and she strained at the discomfort of the tight stitching. A single rope of emeralds hung from her neck and looped down her back; she wore no other jewelry, carried no bag. Her fingers had been varnished with flakes of real rose gold. With her bloodless face coated in a snowy powder and her lips painted the palest of blush tones, Cat was a gift fit for a king.